formatting problems with EMXP...my own test results
2006-01-14 by esynthesist
As some people complained about the incompatibility of EMXP-formatted floppy disks with some EMAX machines, especially EMAX-I / SE, I've done some tests myself today. I could use an EMAX-SE sampler for half an hour. I had two almost identical floppies with me: - the first one was formatted by EMX (MS-DOS 6.22) - the other one was formatted by EMXP (XP Home SP1) Both contained the EMAX-SE OS and the ZD701 arco strings bank. The EMAX-SE had problems with *both disks* ! I booted it approx. 20 times, 10 times with each disk: - the boot was *never* successful with the EMX formatted disk (!) - the boot was 4 times succesful with the EMXP formatted disk, the other 6 times it failed too. Once booted and the OS loaded, everything worked fine, although reading a bank from the EMX disk sometimes resulted in some corrupted presets. During testing I also received some error messages like "disk not formatted" and some faulty characters on the display (again, especially when loading a bank from the EMX formatted disk). The EMAX-SE was in good shape but hadn't been used for some months. The very same 2 disks (but with another OS written to it) work perfectly fine on my EMAX-II machines. Conclusion: I guess the trouble is caused by the age or by the type of the floppy drive in some EMAX machines. As my test indicated that EMX formatted disks also cause problems, I'm afraid I will not be able to "correct" the EMXP software. Either I simply don't have the right specifications (the same ones used in EMX) or these specifications are not 100% compatible with all drives used in EMAX samplers. So the menu topic in EMXP will be changed from "Format an EMAX disk" into "Try to format an EMAX disk" :-) I guess the safest format-function is the one used by the EMAX samplers themselves. Regards, ///E-Synthesist